Review:

In the era of the Sharknado and the Great White Avalanche (if it doesn't exist yet, give it time) Ghost Shark seems almost quaint. Killed by rednecks on a fishing trip, the pissed off spirit of a great white shark comes back hungry for revenge. Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters, Derek Acorah, or Quint from Jaws? We're gonna need a bigger... exorcist, I guess.

Ghost Shark is almost the archetypal Syfy shark movie. From the too-good-to-be-true title, to the amateur island actors (amateur island... Amity island... geddit? Oh, never mind), shockingly bad CGI and even worse script, it's as Syfy as one can get. Its casting is bad, even by Syfy standards. No Danny Trejo, no Michael Madsen – Ghost Shark couldn't even muster up Tara Reid or Lance Henriksen - without any name actors to call upon (well, we should be grateful that they couldn't get charisma vacuum Reid) we're left with the unfiltered ghost shark experience. Oh, and Shawn C. Phillips, a video blogger and Indie actor who keeps popping up in really low budget, terrible horror films. Oh Syfy, you may try to distract us with cheap laughs at the fat guy's expense, but you're fooling no-one.

What a Ghost Shark ultimately amounts to is a shark that can occasionally go places that you wouldn't expect to find a shark. Shark at the car wash for example, or swimming pool, or puddle. Any amount of water can be home to the titular ghost shark, from a bucket of water to the aforementioned puddle. It's more imaginative (and even occasionally entertaining) than I had expected, but it's still unworthy of feature length. I have never seen a Syfy movie that wouldn't have worked just as well as a spoof trailer or short film. When Snakes on a Plane remains the finest high-concept creature feature out there, you know you have a problem.

My problem is that I grow increasingly weary of these movies. Sand Sharks remains the nadir, but Ghost Shark isn't far behind. Not to mention the fact that I'm running out of 'we're gonna need a bigger...' jokes with every dumb shark movie I have to review. I'm gonna need a bigger book of shark puns.

Video, Audio and Special Features:

Video, audio and special features will not be graded as this was a screener.

Grades:

Haribo fiend, Nicolas Cage scholar and frequently functioning alcoholic. These are just some of the words which can be used to describe Joel Harley. The rest, he uses to write film criticism for HorrorTalk and a variety of websites and magazines. Sometimes he manages to do so without swearing.